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Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science

Classical Theories of Beauty and Art

The ancient and early modern foundations of aesthetic theory, tracing a line from Plato's suspicion of mimesis and Aristotle's defense of tragedy through Neoplatonic and medieval accounts of beauty to the Renaissance theory of artistic genius and the eighteenth-century debates over taste, the sublime, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgment.

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  1. Plato on Mimesis and the Banishment of the Poets. Plato judged mimetic art a copy of a copy that corrupts reason, and banished most poets from his city.
  2. Aristotle's Poetics: Catharsis and Tragic Form. Aristotle defended mimesis as natural and defined tragedy by its purgation, catharsis, of pity and fear.
  3. Plotinus and the Neoplatonic Theory of Beauty. Plotinus located beauty in Form illuminating matter, rejecting mere proportion, within his ascent to the One.
  4. Medieval Aesthetics: Beauty as Transcendental. Medieval thinkers cast beauty as divine radiance and proportion, debating its status as a transcendental.
  5. The Renaissance Theory of Artistic Imitation and Genius. Renaissance theory made painting a liberal art and cast the great artist as a genius realizing an inner idea.
  6. Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste". Hume grounded beauty in sentiment yet argued that qualified critics converge on a genuine standard of taste.
  7. Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful. Burke traced the sublime to terror and self-preservation, the beautiful to love, shaping Kant's aesthetics.
  8. Early Modern Debates on the Objectivity of Aesthetic Judgment. Sentimentalists and rationalists clashed over whether beauty is an inner sense or objective perfection.

This is the starting point of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science: you don't need any prior knowledge of this subject to begin.

Key points

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1Plato on Mimesis and the Banishment of the Poets
2Plotinus and the Neoplatonic Theory of Beauty
3The Renaissance Theory of Artistic Imitation and Genius
4Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste"
5Early Modern Debates on the Objectivity of Aesthetic Judgment

Alternative visual view: a simplified sequence of some of the module's key points, in their order within the syllabus.

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Further reading

Bibliography and cited sources used to create this module.

  • Halliwell, S. (2002). The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Eco, U. (1986). Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (H. Bredin, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1959)
  • Panofsky, E. (1968). Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (J.J.S. Peake, Trans.). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. (Original work published 1924)
  • Hume, D. (1757). Of the Standard of Taste. In Four Dissertations. London: A. Millar.
  • Burke, E. (1759). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2nd ed.). London: R. and J. Dodsley.
  • Guyer, P. (2014). A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.